News

The EOSC Association’s General Assembly filled three positions on the EOSC-A Board of Directors, and re-elected Sara Garavelli to a second three-year term. The three new directors are Kamran Naim of CERN and Roxanne Wyns of LIBIS – KU Leuven Libraries, who will both serve three-year terms, and Licia Florio of NORDUnet, who will fill a one-year position. The Directors will take up their responsibilities on 01 January 2025.

At the EOSC Association’s 9th General Assembly meeting, held online on 22 November 2024, five new Members and four new Observers were voted into the Association. These nine organisations are based in seven different countries, representing research-performing organisations, research-funding bodies and service providers. Three of the new Members (SIB, NORDUnet and RDA Europe) upgraded from their previous status as Observers, while the other six organisations are new to EOSC-A.

We are happy to share news about a significant collaboration between the EVERSE and FAIRCORE4EOSC projects (see descriptions below), alongside the launch of the new EOSC-A Opportunity Area Expert Group, OA7: Research Software. Through this collaboration, we are committed to recognizing software as a first-class output, advancing the broader objectives of Open Science, enhancing the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) ecosystem, and ensuring the sustainability of research software infrastructures.

Networking EOSC and NFDI even better – that was the aim of the two-day EOSCxNFDI event. As a side event of the EOSC Symposium 2024, EOSCxNFDI took place on 23 and 24 October at the H4 Hotel Berlin-Alexanderplatz. A total of 122 people attended.

Die österreichische Datenstrategie bildet einen zentralen Pfeiler für den wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt im Land. Sie legt den Grundstein für eine gezielte und verantwortungsvolle Nutzung von Daten, die insbesondere im Bereich der öffentlichen Verwaltung zu evidenzbasierten Entscheidungen beitragen und die Entwicklung neuer, innovativer Dienstleistungen und Produkte vorantreiben sollen. Durch den verstärkten Zugang zu Daten soll nicht nur die Effizienz und Transparenz staatlicher Prozesse verbessert werden, sondern auch ein Beitrag zum Wohl der gesamten Gesellschaft geleistet werden.

Following her re-election as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to put “research and innovation, science and technology, at the centre of our economy” during her next five-year mandate. The rationale for doing so has multiple drivers: a growing innovation gap between Europe, the US and China; increasingly ambitious decarbonisation goals; defence and security threats from war in Ukraine and the Middle East, spurring geopolitical interest in further EU enlargement; and the need for productivity gains to support sustainable growth and competitiveness, among others.

On the 7th of October 2024 the EOSC Support Office Austria hosted a webinar to share the outcomes of the former Task Forces. The aim was to inform the community about the achievements

FAIR Implementation Workshop: National Level Impact on FAIR – Introduction of the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation and the national FAIR initiatives The Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation and the national FAIR initiatives were introduced in the FAIR Implementation Workshop on National Level Impact on FAIR on the 1 October 2024. Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi, first speaker of the EOSC SOA General Assembly, was invited to give a keynote. She presented the Austrian Open Science and FAIR landscape and our initiatives such as EOSC SOA and Cluster Research Data as best practice examples of how to create FAIR implementation plans at the national level.